r mental tools.

That is why they say, "All my life I have been handicapped by lack of
proper preparation. Don't make my mistake, children, go to school."

The young person with electrical genius will make an electrical machine
from a few bits of junk. But send him to Westinghouse and see how much
more he will achieve with the same genius and with finer equipment.

Get the best tools you can. But remember diplomas, degrees are not an
education, they are merely preparations. When you are thru with the
books, remember, you are having a commencement, not an end-ment. You
will discover with the passing years that life is just one series of
greater commencements.

Go out with your fine equipment from your commencements into the school
of service and write your education in the only book you ever can
know--the book of your experience.

That is what you know--what the courts will take as evidence when they
put you upon the witness stand.

The Tragedy of Unpreparedness

The story of Gussie and Bill Whackem is being written in every
community in tears, failure and heartache. It is peculiarly a tragedy
of our American civilization today.

These fathers and mothers who toil and save, who get great farms, fine
homes and large bank accounts, so often think they can give greatness
to their children--they can make great places for them in life and put
them into them.

They do all this and the children rattle. They have had no chance to
grow great enough for the places. The child gets the blame for making
the wreck, even as Gussie was blamed for wrecking his father's plant,
when the child is the victim.

A man heard me telling the story of Gussie and Bill Whackem, and he
went out of my audience very indignant. He said he was very glad his
boy was not there to hear it. But that good, deluded father now has his
head bowed in shame over the career of his spoiled son.

I rarely tell of it on a platform that at the close of the lecture
somebody does not take me aside and tell me a story just as sad from
that community.

For years poor Harry Thaw was front-paged on the newspapers and
gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity.
He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems
to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father
of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention
expenses was one of the greatest business generals of the Keysto